It was possible, of course, that he wished or hoped to seduce her. If so, he seemed to be waiting for her to make the overture—a notion which made her smile. Or—leaving the crassly physical out of it—that he had fallen half in love with her, in a sentimental and innocent old man’s way. Perhaps he just liked to be around pretty young girls, and this was why he had spent his life in the theater. At any rate, even in the privacy of the hotel room, he seemed to be not fond of her so much as friendly—he behaved with perfect correctness, accepted the cup of tea she offered, and demonstrated in a kind of hummingbird squeak how Amelia should do her love duet with Riccardo. (Herma took the tenor part—it was a circus and finally they broke up laughing.)
But then Lloiseaux, gazing around and sipping the last of his tea, set the cup down and said in a surprised tone, “But my dear, why do you live in a hotel, parbleu?”
“It’s very convenient. It’s just across the square from the Opéra, and there are two rooms with connecting bath so that—Fred can be close at hand,” she concluded awkwardly and coloring a little, as though he were about to ask her why it was necessary to take baths with one’s manager. But he didn’t seem interested in her ablutionary habits. “But you can’t entertain here, ma foi. And above all, it is not the thing that a prima donna should do. She should live with panache. She should have her own establishment, and it should be in the proper quarter, somewhere around the Étoile, parbleu.”
“But I’m not a prima donna yet.”
“You can do lead parts. You’ve just sung Riccardo,” he joked. “The point is, you will be a prima donna, and it is necessary to prepare for the role. For life is an opera too, in which we play roles, and people will believe in us only if we play them properly, morbleu. People may say, ‘Who is Herma? A singer who stays at the Scribe.’ Or they may say, ‘Who is Herma? Ah, la diva. I’ve been to her place in the Étoile quarter. A fabulous afternoon.’”
“But I don’t have enough money for an apartment.”
“How much does the Scribe cost?”
“Two hundred francs a week. And an apartment, at least a thousand.”
“Ah,” advised the old fox, who knew Paris thoroughly, “but you mustn’t rent one, you must buy one. In the end it’s cheaper. And, if you pay eight thousand francs down, the payments will be only five hundred a month, which you can easily afford. It’s a sound business.” He scratched his electric hair. “If there should be a war—and it seems likely, with all these Austrians and Serbians rattling their sabers in the Balkans—property values will rise, and you will surely gain by it.”
“But I don’t have eight thousand francs.”
“I will lend it to you, parbleu.”
“But that’s ridiculous.”
“Life is ridiculous. Take my word for it, I have lived a great deal more of it than you have.”
“I know nothing about money,” she told him. “You’ll have to talk to Fred.”
“Why do you want to lend Herma eight thousand francs?” Fred asked him bluntly.
It was the next clay and they were in the other room of the suite at
the Scribe, across from the connecting bath—where there was no piano, but instead a businesslike-looking desk with papers stuck in the pigeonholes. Fred leaned back with his feet on the desk. Lloiseaux sat opposite, in a pretentious but slightly shabby armchair of the kind found in hotels.
“Because she has a promising career before her, and I wish to help her in it. In order to be a prima donna—” Lloiseaux waved the idea toward him.
“I know. It is necessary to live with a certain panache. At present, of course, we’re only in Paris now and then. We travel all over Europe and live out of suitcases. So we don’t need an apartment in Paris. Of course, if she were a sociétaire”—meaning a permanent member of the Opéra company.
But Lloiseaux didn’t rise to this bait. In any case it wasn’t his decision to make, and he could only advise Meyner in such matters. “All these things will come in time. In the meantime, she needs a base, parbleu.” (He spoke of “she” throughout the conversation, while Fred went on saying “we.”) “There ought to be some place to which she can return, where she can live between seasons, and where she can acquire friends and become known in society. The only other possible base is Milan. But life is not so pleasant there, it is a more provincial city, and besides she is very well liked here.”
“Yes,” said Fred. He lit a cigar without offering one to Lloiseaux, who was said to have asthma. After it drew, he said nothing for a moment while he stared at the other man over the tops of his shoes.
“She will need eight thousand to pay down on the apartment,” Lloiseaux went on, “and another few francs for furnishings and such things. Say ten thousand, just to be sure she has enough.”
“In short,” said Fred, “like many others, you wish to set up an opera singer in an apartment. I imagine you will want to pay a visit to her from time to time. Is that it?”
“Ah, ma foi. Everyone will want to come to visit her,” said Lloiseaux blandly.
And so Herma acquired the apartment in avenue Kléber—two bedrooms with connecting bath, a large salon with a slanting ceiling and a window filling one whole wall—really an artist’s studio, except that it faced south and not north—a small kitchenette and a breakfast room, and a nook for the maid if there should ever be one. In the salon there was a Knabe baby grand, a Persian sort of couch with carved feet and an elaborate embroidered spread, a good deal of the art-nouveau furniture that was just coming into fashion, and even a Beardsley print on the wall, just risqué enough to be interesting without offending anyone. Herma had chosen some of these things herself with the help of a decorator, and Lloiseaux the rest. Out through the large window was a view of that tapering and tetrapodal iron monstrosity that dominated the skyline of Paris and was already becoming its landmark—the Awful Tower, those who spoke English called it. The bathtub was carved from a single block of Carrara—like the one in Madame Modjeska’s railroad car, Herma remembered. Fred’s room, which faced east toward the Bois de Boulogne, had a telescope mounted on a tripod, so in the lack of anything else to do he could spy on the ladies and gentlemen taking the air in their carriages along the Lac Inférieur. Although there were fewer carriages and more motorcars in the streets now—you could hear the rumble even from the apartment, which was on the fourth floor.
There was an electric lift in the building, needless to say—like a sedan chair, or a kind of tiny coffin set upright, made of gilded iron and glass, so small that it would hold only two people, or three if they were very well acquainted. When Herma had her Wednesdays—which soon acquired a certain fame at least in the circle of the Opéra and its followers—the guests had to come up in three or four trips, while the boy who brought the champagne and the other amenities carried them sweating up the rear service stairs.
The Wednesdays caught on. It was just as Lloiseaux had predicted—“Herma? Ah, la diva. I’ve been to her place in avenue Kléber. A fabulous afternoon.” (Although some of them did say, “Ah, you’re Minnie,” which made her grind her teeth.) Of course, nobody very famous had come yet—other singers from the Opéra, music students, minor Latin American diplomats, and once the timid Mr. Sienkiewicz, who remembered her from the evening years before at Madame Modjeska’s. “It’s true that he won the Nobel Prize,” Herma told the other guests blithely, “but here he is just our Henry.”
Under the circumstances, it was natural that there were plenty of unattached men—that is, admirers. Herma fended them off, adroitly and not without a certain amusement. She didn’t care to be courted. She preferred to be the one who chose, and she hadn’t found anybody yet that she cared to confer this grace upon. Everyone said that London was the City of Men and Paris the City of Women. There was a good deal to be said for that—the shops, the couturiers, the cafés-dansants and the whole warm, receiving, gay and sun-filled grace of the city were preeminently feminine. Yet there were plenty of men too—otherwise there would have be
en no point in calling it the City of Women, which implied that it was also the Paradise of Men. Amour—as the French called it in their ambiguous way that muddled the whole matter—hung always heavily in the air. And indeed it was difficult not to be constantly reminded of the subject, with that view out the window of the Tour Eiffel “erected” on the Champs de Mars, “thrusting up,” as people said, on the horizon, and seeming to “penetrate” the very heavens. (What brutes men were, Herma thought, as she always had—but now with a complacent little shrug.) Yet she persisted in her “quaint honor” as some poem or other had it. The suitors came, took their glass of champagne and their petits-fours, or the Beluga caviar on English tea biscuits, and departed without ever seeing the riot of pink damask and strawberry-colored velours in the bedroom. The picture in the bedroom was a Fernand Khnopff—a boy scarcely more than a child lying asleep on a fragment of broken Greek temple, while a girl, as naked as he was, bent over curiously to gaze at him—the strawberry motif of the room caught in the red silken scarf that hung in the girl’s hand. Herma had her secret names for the two figures in the painting. But she told no one else about them.
In the middle of all this fun for Herma life was not so easy for Fred, and he was beginning to show the strain. Herma was living as though she were a prima donna, but she was still getting paid second-lead fees, and he had to sweat to find the five hundred francs a month for the payments on the apartment. Dog-tired at the end of the day, he wrote on the mirror:
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
Who the Hell do you think you are?”
He was missing in the afternoons when the caviar and the Moët et Chandon appeared, and meanwhile every morning he was working his rear off finding her parts and trying to get her name known among managers, journalists, and critics. When the rumor came that the director of the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels was in town conducting auditions for a Puccini series, it was necessary for him to bluff his way past the staff of the Hôtel Lutétia and have a private talk with this gentleman before the others got to him. She got the job—Butterfly, Tosca, Manon, and Bohème, her first leads on the Continent except for the tiresome Fanciulla. He made lightning trips to theaters in the provinces—Strasbourg, Kouen, Bordeaux—and came back the same day, in time for Herma’s performance, perhaps, in The Magic Flute at the Châtelet that evening. He found out how to hire claques and how much to pay them. Herma toyed with her ice cream in cafés, but he used cafés to do business in. He made arrangements with the Victor Company to send over its equipment to Paris so that Herma wouldn’t have to go to New York to do her first records, her “Mi chiamano Mimì,” her “Dite alla giovine,” and the Canzonetta from The Marriage of Figaro. He talked Herma, Herma to everybody until every manager in Europe was sick of the subject and slunk away as soon as he saw Fred approaching. Yet the name was spreading. Printed on a playbill, it was enough now to fill a house, at least in Brussels or in Strasbourg.
“The New Melba” was the phrase that came to everybody’s lips. Yet Herma was not quite Melba, even though Fred was careful not to make any objection when the comparison was made. Melba, Fred admitted, had a sublime voice with a silvery and powerful timbre, and was superb in certain parts she had made famous and were her acknowledged territory—Juliette in Roméo et Juliette, Marguerite in Faust, Ophelia in Hamlet. And a large repertory of other things she did—here he would shrug—well enough. “And of course she’s very experienced,” he would add offhandedly—an adroit reference to the fact that she was no longer extremely young—which everyone was aware of anyhow.
Herma was not Melba. But she was something else, and in her way something more. There were many barrel-chested Fräuleins who could bellow Brünnhilde, many charming birds who could twitter Lakmé, many specialists like Maggie Teyte who was famous for her Debussy and her French art songs (here Teyte would have gritted her teeth if she had heard him). But Herma could do anything, Name a part and she could sing it, if she had two days’ notice, the score, an accompanist, and a repetiteur. She could do coloratura, lyric, and dramatic parts, and sing mezzo for an evening or two if necessary. She had three solid octaves with no strain at bottom or top. Her voice was perhaps not a great voice; still, if greatness might consist of doing many different things fairly well, and even occasionally bringing an audience to its feet in a storm of applause and bravas, then Herma’s might be great.
But Herma’s voice was not great. Even Herma herself secretly knew this. Did Fred know it? Fred was a promoter, an entrepreneur. His business was to generate enthusiasm. He said many things and ended by believing them himself—“È una diva,” or “C’est la nouvelle Melba,” all in his confident California twang. So for Fred, Herma’s voice was great, when he was talking to somebody else, in a café or in some manager’s office. What he thought in his private thoughts—he really didn’t have time for private thoughts. He was too busy.
When there was nothing else to do, he went around to cafés passing out the sheet music for the “Addio California” to the orchestra, along with, of course, a small discreet envelope for the Chef d’Orchestre. He used the same techniques, or similar, to disseminate the fame of the Fraise Herma, which was beginning to displace Pêches Melba and Chicken Tetrazzini (and certainly Melba Toast) in the fancy of the public. The large and important cafés—Maxim’s, the Café de la Paix, Fouquet’s, the Royal—had already added it to their dessert menus. Now it was the turn of the small café in Montparnasse and the outlying boulevards. Fred would come along the sidewalk, glance at the posted menu as though he had an idle quarter of an hour to spend, saunter in with a Figaro under his arm, and take a seat on the terrasse.
“A Fraise Herma, please.”
“A what?”
(Here an indignant reaction; he took the cigarette from his mouth and looked up from his newspaper.)
“Fraise Herma.”
“It’s not on the menu.”
“Send the dessert chef.”
And when he came, the instructions were very simple. “First, a crystal goblet, which must be of the best quality, and without flaw. Then …”
Other small and discreet envelopes, of course, had to be passed out to dessert chefs and the like. The goal—which Fred was fast approaching—was a Paris in which the orchestra in every café and hotel would break into the “Addio California” the moment Herma appeared on the scene, and a waiter would come up, immediately and smoothly, to set before her a Fraise Herma constructed to the precise formula. If the strawberry slid off to one side, or if an inferior café tried to palm off caramel syrup in place of apricot glaze—someone would suffer—there would be an uproar.
It was Herma herself who thought of the final touch to add to the now-famous confection. At a late supper at the Ritz with the Brazilian military attaché after a performance of the Fanciulla (bother the stupid thing), she gazed at her apparently perfect Fraise Herma without touching it, and called for Olivier the headwaiter, an old friend of hers by this time.
There was something wrong?
No, she mused thoughtfully, it was that—something was missing. The final touch was lacking somehow. Perhaps if a—what?—a little ring of whipped cream could be added around the rim of the goblet, to hide the place where the ice cream and the glaze melted and blurred together a little …
Olivier sent for Clémentin, the dessert chef and the acknowledged master of his trade in all Paris.
Whipped cream?
Yes. That is, beaten cream, so that it becomes solid.
After a little linguistic discussion, Clémentin grasped that what she wished was Crème Chantilly. Herma in her turn explained to him that Crème Chantilly in English was whipped cream, crème fouettée, and Clémentin commented after a moment of thought, with a little smile, “That is a very passionate idea.”
So the waiter took the Fraise Herma back to the kitchen, and there Clémentin remodeled it, or rather threw it away, since it was already melting, and made another one, getting out his pastry gun at the end to add a
little ring of ruffled Chantilly around the edge of the goblet. This he brought to the table himself. And more—an unprecedented event—he stayed to watch her while she ate it.
The people at nearby tables were looking too, along with the Brazilian military attaché, who had ordered only coffee after the supper but was now thinking of changing his mind. The Fraise Herma was in fact transformed. Now the pale gold hemisphere with its strawberry point emerged modestly and enticingly, as it were, from a lacy lingerie of whipped cream, as though half unwilling to show itself. And when Herma, according to her usual technique, began by daintily lifting away the white frill around the edges of the goblet before attacking the mound in the center, it was almost as though someone were—the Brazilian attaché colored a little and smiled sheepishly. He ordered one for himself.
After this celebrated evening, Herma was shrewd enough to credit Clémentin as the inventor of the confection, and it was so indicated on the menu of the Ritz in its next printing:
Fraise Herma
après la creation de M. Clémentin, maître-chef patissier
The casting for the Tales took place in September. The production was scheduled for April, toward the end of the season. It was agreed from the beginning that the permanent company would do the minor parts, Chaliapin the basso, and Vladi Czermak the tenor. Meyner insistently held out for three different sopranos to sing Olympia, Giulietta, and Antonia. His arguments were incisive, knowledgeable, and authoritative. They broke down fundamentally into three points:
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